http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog/ en-us rdm@cfcl.com Sat, 03 Jul 2010 17:01:42 -0800 http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog/archives/001737.html This afternoon, I received a call from an online vendor whose web site we recently used, attempting to make a purchase. He said that our recent order used a flag indicating that a 10% discount code was enabled, but we had no such discount authorized. I expected him to suggest an adjustment and/or ask exactly what we did, so that he could try to reproduce the problem.... http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog/archives/001735.html Although I've played with SketchUp Ruby from time to time over the past few years, my first real introduction occurred in the Fall of 2009. Igloo Studios, a well-known name in SketchUp modeling and training, brought me in to maintain some of their tools and create some others. Clearly, I had some homework to do.... http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog/archives/001729.html I tend to use a fairly minimal subset of YAML for configuration files. YAML supports my favorite data structures (lists and hashes) and is easy to read and edit (particularly if one ignores its syntax for declaring data types and such). However, in a recent project, I found myself using CSV (comma-separated value) files, instead.... http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog/archives/001716.html My recent post, Using Cucumber with SketchUp, discussed one possible way to combine Google SketchUp with other packages. However, there are lots of other possible mash-ups. This entry discusses some of these; other suggestions are welcome...... http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog/archives/001714.html Cucumber is a Ruby-based tool (technically, a domain-specific language) that helps programmers and their clients define and agree on tests of program behavior. These tests can be used to guide development, enforce acceptance criteria, and detect regressions. Although it is popular in the larger Ruby community, Cucumber has not been used (as far as I can tell) to develop Ruby-based extensions for Google SketchUp. This seems like an unfortunate situation; perhaps it's time to see what can be done about... http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog/archives/001703.html The data models for Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) can be a bit difficult to understand, even at the simplest level. Here are some visualizations (and explanations) I've found useful: Table Abstract 3D Space Directed Graph Decorated Hierarchy Sets and Mappings Collections of Triples I'd be delighted to hear about other ways of thinking about this. All comments and/or corrections are welcome...... http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog/archives/001702.html I recently organized an Installfest for the San Francisco Semantic Web Meetup. It was held at PariSoMa, a co-working venue in SoMa (South of Market Street in San Francisco). Given that this was my first attempt at pulling together this sort of "hands on" meeting for the group, I think it went pretty well. I had several reasons for organizing the meeting, but the primary one was to bring together a group of SemWeb enthusiasts who want to learn about... http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog/archives/001701.html RDF/XML, the "official" serialization format for RDF (Resource Description Framework) was never designed for use by humans. Turtle (Terse RDF Triple Language) is a great improvement, but it's still a bit verbose for my tastes. SPARQL, being largely modeled after Turtle, shares many of its limitations.... http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog/archives/001700.html I don't envy conference program committee members. They have a difficult and generally thankless job, made worse by occasional rants such as this one. However, I really have to say something about RubyConf 2009.... http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog/archives/001698.html Large-scale computer networks can involve hundreds of thousands of components (eg, computers, programs, routers) and an even larger number of connections. These systems are also highly interdependent: the loss of a single component or connection can have far-reaching effects.... http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog/archives/001695.html I've been programming for several decades, but I'm relatively new to ontology development in general and OWL in particular. So, I'm certainly not an expert on the range of work in this area. However, I think I see some areas where programming best practices and tools could provide useful "safety nets" for OWL-based ontology developers.... http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog/archives/001689.html Not everyone knows that Apple has a way to submit bug reports. Or, more to the point, that they actually read them. However, it turns out that Apple engineers interact continuously with a bug tracking system called RADAR and that there is a reliable way for "civilians" to submit reports to it. I've submitted quite a few reports (about one report a month, for several years) and the responses were always polite and generally clueful.... http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog/archives/001685.html I'm currently looking at a wiki page for an (unnamed) Open Source project. The page has a number of minor errors; I'd be happy to help the developer(s) clean it up. Except...... http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog/archives/001684.html http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog/archives/001674.html In What do we need to get on Ruby 1.9?, Yehuda Katz says he thinks it's time to get serious about migrating the Ruby community to Ruby 1.9. He then asks for specific information on show-stoppers: gems, plugins, tools, and such that don't yet work on Ruby 1.9. His request has already resulted in a lot of opinions and anecdotal evidence, but I think there is a fairly obvious way to get better information....